61–69 of 69 posts
The Club of Rome [1] did the same thing in 1972 with its famous study »The Limits to Growth« [2] and came to similar conclusions. An updated version »Beyond the Limit« [3] has been published after 20 years in 1993. The model they developed is called World3 [4]. After 30 years they validated their model and published »Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update« in 2004. The actual development of our world over this 30 years…
The Club of Rome [1] did the same thing in 1972 with its famous study »The Limits to Growth« [2] and came to similar conclusions. An updated version »Beyond the Limit« [3] has been published after 20 years in 1993. The model they developed is called World3 [4]. After 30 years they validated their model and published »Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update« in 2004. The actual development of our world over this 30 years…
What is that ending?
WARNING: Doom n' Gloom post :P I'm not arguing against the need for such studies, however I find it amazing that this is debatable at all. Expecting that we as a species or society aren't subject to the most fundamental laws of the universe isn't rational. Even in the negligible timescale of our own species we've seen repeated cycles of collapse, the planet is littered with the remains of failed species. The only rea…
I don't imagine this is something that sits well with the entrepreneurial spirit of HN readers Would that explain why this post moved from number 3 on HN to bottom of page 3 in a matter of minutes?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't imagine this is something that sits well with the entrepreneurial spirit of HN readers Would that explain why this post moved from number 3 on HN to bottom of page 3 in a matter of minutes?
Please, not this thing about defense spending again ... you could feed and clothe them many times over, for many generations, with all the entitlement spending ...
I'm ravished by the sheer implausibility of that. Carry on.
I agree that inequality is a growing problem for our economic and democratic models, but I think we need to keep two things seperate: Inequality of resource usage and inequality of resource ownership. The super rich may be thousands or hundereds of thousands of times as wealthy as the average person, but they do not eat thousands of times as much and they do not personally use thousands of times as much energy as the…
The fact that inequal distribution of wealth is still a reality we accept in our time is really mind-boggling. Even more so given the fact that it's 1 of the main reasons for a likely future collapse of our civilization. (We still don't use the full potential of our collective intelligence; we know exactly what's wrong, but behave like hypnotized rabbits, instead of starting to coordinate for a collaborative culture/…
Also, what about people outside that company? Should they also get some money, even though some of them contributed exactly zero? You could argue that some government services did contribute, like cops and roads, but that still wouldn't include the majority of the population.
In short, I think there are no easy solutions to "inequal distribution of wealth". Whatever you pick is going to come with its own serious downsides.
Based on the long history of collapse of civilizations discussed in the introduction, we separated the population into 'Elites' and 'Commoners', and introduced a variable for accumulated wealth ... We have also added a di fferent dimension of predation whereby Elites 'prey' on the production of wealth by Commoners. As a result, HANDY consists of just four prediction equations: two for the two classes of population, Elites and Commoners, denoted by xE and xC, respectively, one for the natural resources or Nature, y, and one for the accumulated Wealth, w, referred to hereafter as 'Wealth'. This minimal set of four equation seems to capture essential features of the human-nature interaction and is capable of producing major potential scenarios of collapse or transition to steady state.
This definitely has some uses but is being misreported. A four equation model that splits people into two polarised classes doesn't really tell us much about the real world. There are lots of reasons to feel gloomy about the future for sure, but this little model isn't really adding to the evidence in any substantial way.
